


i used to recognise myself (it's funny how reflections change)

by nikneedsalife



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Amnesia, Can be interpreted as Gen, Disappearance AU, Gen, Lance-centric, POV Multiple, but could be interpreted as pre-slash
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-31
Updated: 2017-10-31
Packaged: 2019-01-27 05:20:06
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,673
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12574576
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nikneedsalife/pseuds/nikneedsalife
Summary: Everyone expects Lance to be with Hunk, because that’s the way it works; Lance and Hunk, side by side, taking down whatever bad guy stands in their path through excessive screaming and heartfelt reunions.Lance isn’t with him. Everyone starts to worry.





	i used to recognise myself (it's funny how reflections change)

**Author's Note:**

> This thing exists partly bc I'm forcing myself to write shorter fics due to an inability to finish anything above 4k
> 
> unbeta'ed

title from [James Bay - LET IT GO](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GsPq9mzFNGY)

* * *

 

 

  Lance disappears three years into the war.

  It’s in the final stages of their biggest battle against the Emperor Zarkon yet; but then again, each time they fight it’s the biggest battle until now, a loop of destruction and risk rising as each side struggles for the upper hand. It is almost a repeat of their first coup against the Galra tyranny as Haggar activates a wormhole that rips Voltron apart, each lion flung into a separate section of space like stuffed toys in the possession of a petulant child. Emperor Zarkon isn’t aiming to kill with this move, that much seems obvious. It’s a tactical move to stall for time and bring the Alliance in disorder for as long as he can. The Alliance is a fully working system of cooperation by now, but Voltron is still the figurehead of the ship, the symbol of hope.

  Allura and Coran find Shiro first, chilling on an ice planet, and Pidge crash-lands on the planet Alkari and is back in business within two days. Hunk takes a little longer to find, but the blade of Marmora tracks him down somewhere in the Quazrt galaxy soon enough. Keith, an experienced and well-worn warrior of Marmora by now, volunteers to pick him up.

  Everyone expects Lance to be with Hunk, because that’s the way it works; Lance and Hunk, side by side, taking down whatever bad guy stands in their path through excessive screaming and heartfelt reunions.

  Lance isn’t with him. Everyone starts to worry.

  They find the red lion in Galra territory, being used as bait to lure in Voltron.

  No Lance.

  Lance isn’t replaceable, but they manage.

 They can’t afford to wait, not stuck in the middle of a universal war that encompasses all they know. Lives are stake; Keith understands this now, and swallows his pride as his friends look on when he walks into Red for the first time in, well- a little less than two years.

 The Blade has taught him more than Voltron ever could; to not ride that wave of anger, think in a practical, rational way that won’t jeopardize the mission, to work in a team without strangling his partners with a failed bagel (long story). That fire is still there, but it’s channeled differently now. Risks are still something he takes, over-emotionality still gets the better of him on occasions, and he never, ever gives up even when he should. But- and Shiro confirms this when Red bursts to life- he knows how to swallow his pride for the good of the mission.

  The roar of Red reverberates through the walls of the castle, and it feels a little like they’ve given up on Lance.

  None of them have given up on Lance.

  Pidge has bags under her eyes from the night-hours spent searching through signals for a sign. Shiro hides tears whenever they find something of Lance’s strewn around in the castle. Allura sometimes disappears for hours, doing something no one dares ask her about. Coran exhausts all his underworld contacts asking for news, and Keith gets into arguments with Kolivan in his frustration of the Blade’s uneventful search. Hunk is perhaps the worst; a little rougher towards the other paladins, a little jagged at the edges.

  Slowly a month turns into two, two turns into six, and six into a year.

  They will never give up, but it gets pretty close sometimes.

  The things that drives them crazy is that they don’t know. They don’t know whether Lance is dead, alive, or imprisoned. They don’t know anything. If the Galra had him, they would have gloated and used Lance against them by now. They would have heard something through the grapevine. The last news all of them have of Lance is his yell as they got sucked into Haggar’s wormhole. He could be anywhere, or nowhere at all.

  The universe has never seemed so big.

  Hunk loses his right leg because of a stupid mistake during battle, and it’s the trigger pin to Voltron almost falling apart. They hold onto the threads of their weird little family, tie it all together with whatever string of affection they can find, but everyone is so, so tired of war.

  Keith leaves as soon as Matt Holt connects with Red. It’s a surprising development for his character type, but Matt is the ideal right-hand man to Shiro, and works together in a synchronicity with Pidge that Keith will never achieve. Both of them never give up, both of them are fighters, both of them are passionate about what they do, and more importantly, they are both survivors. Matt just loves a little differently.

  Occasionally Matt will say something that reminds everyone of Lance, which is often, and the forbidding silence in the room speaks for itself. Yet Matt also holds them all together when they can’t themselves, makes Allura smile for the first time in a month, gets Pidge to go to sleep, cracks jokes with Coran, is a shoulder to cry on for Hunk, guides Shiro in the right direction when his frustration at the war gets the best of him. Matt fills in all the little holes Lance’s absence tore into them, and he hems the edges of the large tear that is uniquely Lance’s.

  They look on Earth, a last desperate bid to find him. They check with his family in Cuba because if Lance could have gone anywhere on Earth, it would be there. Pidge runs scans for facial recognition that go over the whole globe, thanks to alien tech. It’s all very hush-hush, because the Earth doesn’t know about extraterrestrial life yet, let alone the war; the general consensus of the rest of the universe is that a planet must discover other planets and not vice versa.

  A couple of them hate that they feel a little relief mixed in with the disappointment; they like to think that Lance would have fought tooth and nail to get back to them if he could, not fled back to Earth.

  Perhaps the worst of it all is that the universe starts to forget Lance. It has been two years, by now, and he is no longer a priority, not when Voltron seems to be functioning fine.  When all that they can hear is radio silence, it’s hard to find a reason to keep looking. Pidge realizes she can’t fully remember the sound of his voice. Hunk forgets what room in the castle he used to sleep in. Shiro wakes up one morning and realizes he hasn’t thought about Lance in a week. When there’s nothing around to remind them of him, how are they supposed to remember?

  It’s the not knowing that gets to them the most. They may be paladins of Voltron, but they are also people who don’t have much hope left inside them; in the dark, one of them will confess that they sometimes wish they knew for sure that Lance was dead, because at least then they could have an answer. It tears everyone apart with guilt, bit by bit.

  They deal, because they have to.

***

  After two years, ten months and four days of nothing, they get something.

  Or, more accurately, Keith gets a gun to the temple.

  It’s a run-of-the-mill Blade mission; get onto planet AW384, a hub for rogues and all sort of nasty individuals that belongs to neither the Galra nor the Alliance, find the what’s-the-name that’s supposed to help them build a new weapon, then get the hell out of Dodge before anyone sees. It’s a stealth mission, essentially, never Keith’s forte but he’s perfectly capable.

  Or so he thinks until Keith realizes he’s being followed, which is rather unpractical yet nothing he can’t deal with. Shadows loom as he ducks into a nearby alley, away from the crowded streets where black-market vendors yell and sell their products in a chaos of bustling figures. The rickety buildings on either side reach several stories high, held together by wood and pure determination. Keith takes into a quick succession of steps, leaping onto a nearby crate and scaling upwards until he hangs off the stray bar of a collapsed balcony. Beneath him, the shadow following him out of the corner of his eye the past hour slips into the alley and walks under him, cautious.

  Keith drops down, knife in hand, when the cloaked figure whirls around just in time to press him into the wall with his hands behind his back. Keith struggles for a moment, but the person has him pinned on all points. Hot breath fans over his neck as he hears the click of a safety going off. Cold metal presses to his temple. It’s such a simple yet efficient move that Keith doesn’t know how to react, caught off guard.

   _This is it_ , Keith thinks. _I’m going to die on goddamn planet AW384 at the hands of some amateur assassin_.

  “Who are you?”

  The gruff question is as surprising as the sudden push that sends him back to the wall, thin black sleeve falling back to reveal a tanned arm that presses into his throat. The gun is now digging into his gut, and Keith- Keith knows the slope of that nose, the jutted angle of that chin.

 

  Keith isn’t proud of what he does next. But the fast right hook that knocks Lance out and sends him crumpling down to the dirty stones feels shockingly satisfying.

***

  The man- because he’s obviously a man now, none of them have been children for years- that wears Lance’s scarred face is an empty shell of what he once was. The man that slumps on the castle couch looks like the life has been knocked out of him. This man is defensive, face shuttered, and refuses to speak. This man is not Lance.

     Matt and Lance observe each other like animals in a zoo, weary. The shock has seemed to paralyze everyone except Matt and Keith; Keith has already explained Lance doesn’t remember anything past three years ago. Lance won’t tell them anything else, it’s clear he doesn’t trust these strangers who all seem to know who he is, where he’s from, and have abducted him from the only environment he’s familiar with to keep him captive in a flying spaceship.

  The hem of Lance’s cotton pants lifts up a little as he stretches, tired. Everyone hesitates as metal flashes, before suddenly Hunk- so silent and restrained and obviously terrified out his mind to everyone but Lance, who speaks to them as if he were a stranger- lets out a wail and rushes over. Lance is bundled up in a hug, tense as the pulled string of a bow, and when Hunk starts to sob into his shoulder, he awkwardly pats him on the back.

  Lance is missing his left leg.  

  Thing is, Lance doesn’t know what he’s missing. He knows there’s something, there was always a something since he woke up, afraid and fending for himself. But it’s so abstract, so transparent, he spends his nights roaming over the castle as if it can somehow lead him to it. Occasionally he sleepwalks, and it gives everyone a painful sort of hope, because Lance seems to be following the same routes he did all those years ago. Shiro finds him curled up over the kitchen table one night when he goes to get a midnight snack. He doesn’t stir once as Shiro cradles him like a small child and brings him to Pidge’s room where she’s still working through some code with Matt by her side, just in case he decides to wander off again.

  Lance wakes up that morning feeling safe, curled into the warm blankets with Pidge cuddled into his side, a feeling he doesn’t remember, yet somehow does. It gives them hope.

  Hunk and Allura take him swimming in the castle pool after they describe it to him too enthusiastically, and that hope evaporates when he almost drowns in the deep end, crawling out coughing like a drowned cat.

  Lance tries to figure out where he fits in in this mess of a family, but he feels like the lost piece of a puzzle that’s been found again, except the edges are frayed and broken and he doesn’t quite fit even though he should. Lance doesn’t belong in Voltron anymore; they’ve all adapted too much, he has no more roles to take on.

  Rumour start to spread of his return, and the Alliance asks what Lance will contribute to the war.

  They can’t give them an answer, because there is none. Lance was never replaceable, but they adapted to his loss; that is how this war works. Voltron has always been for its sentimentality, but most others are not. Lance used to be a great diplomat, but that was taken away along with his memories. Lance is too lost within himself to be of any use to others, is rude and angry and volatile and when they meet with the Blade of Marmora, Keith hurts to see himself in this distorted version of Lance. The other paladins sympathise, of course, how can they not?- their friend is back. But he’s not the _same_. Whenever they talk to Lance, he feels as if they’re expecting something from him he can’t give, an undeniable pressure on his shoulders to do something, to go back to whoever the boy he used to be was. They tell him about this boy; he’s not him, can’t imagine being him. To his friends, he’s _Lance_. To himself, he never even had a name.

   Sometimes, Pidge will catch Lance in the hangars, staring at Blue from the floor like she holds all his answers; tiny vulnerable man and big metal lion.

 

  It takes a screaming match between him and Allura, very much one-sided on his part as he explodes into a mess of frustration only to be met with cool-headed sympathy, so condescending and kind and he _hates_ it because _his memories aren’t coming back, it’s not going to happen, give up on him, he doesn’t need their hope!_

Allura asks him how he knew how to follow Keith. Lance turns into the silence after a gunshot.

  He didn’t know. He just did.

 

  Lance starts to hope again.

 

***

 

  Lance finds a jacket, hidden in the back of a closet behind a frayed blue bathrobe where someone- he assumes Shiro- stuffed it all those years ago. The sleeves are frayed and there’s a rip in the left pocket, not to mention a weird goo stain on the hood. As he shakes off the dust, a folded photograph slips out and flutters to the ground. Lance picks it up, unfolds it, smoothes down the creases, takes a look and-

 

  “We took this on the planet Feltriz.” Lance forces out, chest heaving with exertion. “It was right after Shiro came back, and Allura gave us a few hours off to enjoy the beach. Hunk and I annihilated Pidge, Coran and Keith in beach volley.”

  Lance had come skidding into the kitchen all of a sudden, arms flailing and torpedoing towards Matt as soon as they caught sight of each other. Matt stares at him, eyes wide and a spoon full of goo suspend mid-bite. Lance shakes the photograph at him, insistent, and he takes it hesitantly. “I don’t remember everything about it,” Lance barrels on, “but I know Shiro asked a local to take the picture for us. The camera was covered in slime for days afterwards, because apparently that’s what the inhabitants of that planet give off when they come into contact with metal.”

  “How do y-” Matt tries to say.

  “ _I don’t know_! It just suddenly clicked and the memory was _there_ and I remembered something- _remembered_!  It's barely anything but do you know how weird that feels?”

  

  The paper is faded, dusted, worn and frayed; but the new smile Lance wears as he looks at it is the same as in the photograph. 


End file.
